lisbon@chinet.UUCP (gerry swetsky) (01/18/88)
I hope someone can benefit from this. Vpnet's equipment is a 3B1 with a 40mb Miniscribe that has (or had) about 33% free space on the disk, and UNIX 3.50. Vpnet supports an AKCS conferencing board. The first move was stupid. Not what I did, but how I did it. I gave the following commands as root from the root directory. rm /tmp/*;rmdir tmp;mkdir tmp;chmod 777 tmp;fsck All right so far? No, not really. It turned out that what I had actually typed was rm /tmp *; ...and all the rest correctly. The 'unix' file is now missing from /. Well, fsck found an unconnected file, I answered 'yes' to 'Reconnect?', and there my problems began. When the system tried to reboot it couldn't find the unix file in the root directory. Realizing what I had done, I tried the boot floppy and then the floppy file system disk. It warned me that if I went further I would erase everything on the disk. I didn't want to do that yet so I answered 'no' to 'Do you wish to proceed?' and got the root prompt. Then I linked the file system to floppy UNIX and verified the damage I had done. If I had put a copy of the kernel anywhere else on the disk, I could have copied it to root and rebooted from the hard disk. But I wasn't that smart. The floppy file system disk does NOT contain a copy of the 'unix' file and at that point I couldn't change floppies because the file system was mounted on that floppy disk. Wait, it gets better.... I finally admitted defeat and reloaded the system software followed by my last backup. The backup consists of exactly 70 disks. At disk #62 I got a message telling me there was no more room for restoring files!!!!! I was supposed to remove some files and START OVER! That means from disk #1, folks! Well, I may be a glutton for punishment, but NO WAY was I about to start over. If those files CAME from that disk, why won't they go back to that disk? Especially when there is over 30% free space left. Vpnet is up such as it is. All my restored files have the same date on them, so I can't go through my conferencing board and delete inactive messages 'cause they all say Jan 16. My backup is useless, and as far as I'm concerned so is my 3B1. Your comments, etc. are most welcome. -- ============================================================================= | ....and we thank you for your support Gerry Swetsky | | ..!ihnp4!vpnet!lisbon | =============================================================================